Have you spent your entire life raised to put more weight in others’ comfort, opinions, achievements than your own?
It’s REALLY easy to gaslight someone. Congratulations, you’re not a predator who seeks out/recognizes these qualities in someone for you to take advantage of.
It IS common. It exists in many forms of abusive relationships. The fucking problem is that the internet is stupid as fuck and doesn’t understand what gaslighting is. If you start to question your intelligence, memory, etc because your partner is always contradicting you, just them, yeah that’s gaslighting. Disagreeing or the person is being a jerk and saying those lines doesn’t mean “you’re being gaslit” it’s a process and state of mind and being. You can be gaslit to believe your father never spent months painting himself blue trying to get into the blue man group, but that’s if you are convinced! Someone telling you that your dad never blue himself trying to convince you does NOT mean you were gaslit.
Also lying isn’t gaslighting. The point is someone questioning or changing their reality.
Sorry for the rant. I’m very passionate about abuse awareness and can’t self edit so well.
Can confirm, I used to have a partner that was conditioned to accept gaslighting by their narcissistic father. They had a terrible memory for his abuse. Like he’d say these flagrantly horrible things, and I’d try to talk to them about it later and half the time they just… wouldn’t remember it.
It was really easy to accidentally railroad them too. Like I had to learn to be hyper aware of anything I said that might unconsciously contradict what they wanted, because they would just self-edit to remove the contradiction.
It’s what ended the relationship really, because even though they didn’t always consciously remember the abuse, they did expect it, and it was impossible to have a conversation about a difficult issue without them perceiving abuse and sidestepping it. The conversation would go in circles. When I got good enough at anticipating the ways they would sidestep topics, they had another strategy - just dissociate and blank out, so I’m left standing there going, “Hello? Can you hear me?”
Gaslighting is real, and it does serious damage to people.
No, honestly it’s actually pretty hard to actually gaslight someone. I know you think you see it in abusive relationships, but I really think your just misremembering honest mistakes as gaslighting. I mean you’ve made mistakes like that before in the past remember? So yeah, no big deal, just chalk it up to stress. And you trust me right? You know I would never lie to you.
Have you spent your entire life raised to put more weight in others’ comfort, opinions, achievements than your own?
It’s REALLY easy to gaslight someone. Congratulations, you’re not a predator who seeks out/recognizes these qualities in someone for you to take advantage of.
It IS common. It exists in many forms of abusive relationships. The fucking problem is that the internet is stupid as fuck and doesn’t understand what gaslighting is. If you start to question your intelligence, memory, etc because your partner is always contradicting you, just them, yeah that’s gaslighting. Disagreeing or the person is being a jerk and saying those lines doesn’t mean “you’re being gaslit” it’s a process and state of mind and being. You can be gaslit to believe your father never spent months painting himself blue trying to get into the blue man group, but that’s if you are convinced! Someone telling you that your dad never blue himself trying to convince you does NOT mean you were gaslit.
Also lying isn’t gaslighting. The point is someone questioning or changing their reality.
Sorry for the rant. I’m very passionate about abuse awareness and can’t self edit so well.
Can confirm, I used to have a partner that was conditioned to accept gaslighting by their narcissistic father. They had a terrible memory for his abuse. Like he’d say these flagrantly horrible things, and I’d try to talk to them about it later and half the time they just… wouldn’t remember it.
It was really easy to accidentally railroad them too. Like I had to learn to be hyper aware of anything I said that might unconsciously contradict what they wanted, because they would just self-edit to remove the contradiction.
It’s what ended the relationship really, because even though they didn’t always consciously remember the abuse, they did expect it, and it was impossible to have a conversation about a difficult issue without them perceiving abuse and sidestepping it. The conversation would go in circles. When I got good enough at anticipating the ways they would sidestep topics, they had another strategy - just dissociate and blank out, so I’m left standing there going, “Hello? Can you hear me?”
Gaslighting is real, and it does serious damage to people.
No, honestly it’s actually pretty hard to actually gaslight someone. I know you think you see it in abusive relationships, but I really think your just misremembering honest mistakes as gaslighting. I mean you’ve made mistakes like that before in the past remember? So yeah, no big deal, just chalk it up to stress. And you trust me right? You know I would never lie to you.